News
Department of Packaging and Graphic Media Science

RIT’s packaging science program recently received an equipment donation for its Packaging Dynamics Laboratory that will increase its academic and professional training options in safe-guarding shipped products.

Analytical thinking, complex problem solving, creativity, resiliency, and flexibility are among the top skills needed for emerging careers by 2025. Anticipating these rapid changes in the workplace—further accelerated by lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic—RIT is seizing on the opportunity to guide students to “new economy majors” that are multi­disciplinary, transformative, and future-focused.

Students on co-op are picking up more than occupational and professional skills. As the pandemic unfolded last spring and summer, they saw firsthand how companies manage even in the midst of a crisis.

The RIT student-designers on Team Frears placed second in the 2020 Paperboard Packaging Student Design Challenge for their packaging designs of a toolkit for educators to be distributed by the national program Trees into Cartons, Cartons into Trees, (TICCIT).

Intersections: The RIT Podcast, Ep. 37: Printing, a storied industry, continues to see an evolution. RIT alumnus Henry Freedman and Professors Robert Eller and Bruce Myers discuss the strength of the industry, the rise of inkjet printing and the role RIT plays in developing professionals who can take the printing industry to the next level.

When new students come to RIT, they join the ever-growing Tiger family. For John B. Lawrence and his younger brother, Jared Lawrence, the Tiger family is more than just a proximal community; it’s also based on actual bloodlines.

Ben Camp '13 BS, '18 MS (Media Arts and Technology) is a graphic designer at Illuminate, a clinical sales training and development agency. 

RIT will host a discussion featuring printing industry scientists who achieved a historic first: matching image quality and exceeding the consistency of traditional offset printing using a web-fed inkjet printer in production conditions. Print-technology researchers Henry Freedman, Peter Crean, Peter Dundas and Eric Zeise will visit campus Feb. 13.

Undergraduate students from packaging science, graphic design and industrial design worked over the semester to improve packaging and branding identity for Milwaukee Tools and its Shockwave power drill bits as part of the Packaging Systems class challenge.

Print media graduate student Emily Shriver headed a project to assess how individuals recognize manipulated images used in news. She found that most people are skeptical about images seen in print or online news, but only half can tell which images actually are altered.

Funding from the long-time corporate partner will support two innovative packaging centers at RIT: the American Packaging Corp. Center for Packaging Innovation, a comprehensive teaching, research and testing laboratory; and the Center for Sustainable Packaging. Both centers are located in RIT’s College of Engineering Technology.